frontend-patterns/research/reviews/ResearchOptimization.md

Research cycle optimization

Date: 2026-09-25. Reviewer: codex, self-review. Question: can we avoid redundant inference while making the first application test expose concrete research needs? No new paid live calls or source collection this cycle.

Execution policy and verification

New conditional-v1 workspaces screen candidate ledgers before continuing. Zero/one candidate produces an empty relation set deterministically; multiple candidates permit one relation call which must pass endpoint/evidence-field checks. A deterministic editorial checklist replaces automatic model self-critique. This prevents the repeated claim-ID relation failure from propagating and avoids treating self-approval as validation.

Explicit reuse checks completed-run/cache integrity and fingerprints source, prompts, workflow, adapter settings and code. Matching stages replay with origin provenance; failed runs and changed inputs cannot silently qualify. Reuse is not freshness checking of an external runtime profile. Current call/token accounting excludes cached responses.

Tests cover zero/one/two-candidate branches, valid/invalid edges, malformed candidates, zero-call replay, changed source/prompt/fixture/model, cache corruption and failed-run rejection. A local mock llm-connect HTTP service verifies execution/reuse accounting. The checked-in synthetic smoke used two fixture calls; its replay used zero. Relative to four historical calls, those branches remove two calls or all fresh calls respectively. This is a call-count result, not a measured percentage reduction in live cost or quality.

Compact records and structured candidate/relation ledgers remain the output contract. Source locators stay in the evidence ledger/prose. A structured report distinguishes structural rejections from unassessed editorial corrections. The review-metrics template requires individual findings before counts can mean anything.

First application test

VC-02 walkthrough connects Local Commit Boundary, Pending Synchronization, Conflict Copy and Explicit Reconciliation. These are four research hypotheses, not canonical patterns. It traces a restart, divergent edits, preserved conflict, explicit resolution and lost acknowledgement. Removing concurrent writers removes conflict-specific steps while retaining persistence/retry.

The baseline narrative can already describe the same architecture. The proposed benefit of the vocabulary is exposing acknowledgement and recovery boundaries for review; independent evidence of improved decision quality remains unknown. Explicit Reconciliation may be merged into Conflict Copy if it adds no independent retrieval/application value.

Editorial corrections made in this cycle

• Replaced one ambiguous saved/synced interpretation with three explicit boundaries: local commit, receiver acknowledgement and semantic resolution (VC-02 trace).
• Narrowed restart survival to a stated storage-transaction assumption; no power-loss guarantee is inferred from a local database being present (VC-02 assumptions/failures).
• Rejected the implication that a receiver acknowledgement proves all-device convergence or backup availability (VC-02 steps 9–10).

These are three recorded design corrections, not model-error-rate measurements. The synthetic smoke has not received substantive research review and does not inherit them.

Next questions, ranked by walkthrough impact

1. Select and verify a storage acknowledgement/atomicity contract under interruption.
2. Locate and test receiver deduplication plus revision ancestry under a lost response.
3. Define keyboard/screen-reader conflict discovery and resolution acceptance checks.
4. Contrast VC-01's global validation requirement before generalizing these relations.

T02 owns targeted evidence; T03 now owns the draft walkthrough and connected candidate set. Runtime proof, canonical admission, VC-01 and the full M1 gate remain unfinished. No further broad extraction is justified until it answers one of these questions.